A few weeks before the Tour de France, Jaguar invited journalists to a ceremonial unveiling of this year’s Team Sky Tour bike, a joint venture between the British car maker which supplies Sky with its support vehicles and Pinarello, its bike builder.

The Dogma F8 may be one of the most aerodynamic Tour bikes ever made, but it had a nightmarish Tour. Chris Froome’s crash and his team’s futile fight to salvage something from the race only served as a reminder that the bikes are irrelevant if the human beings aboard aren’t up to scratch.

The Jaguar XF Sportbrake which conveyed the Observer from Yorkshire to Paris via much of France shared the same sleek, smooth lines of the Dogma F8, but it had a far happier Tour. One judge of the Tour car is how the roadside gallery responds. A Citroën C5 I drove a few years ago incited old men to wind down their windows and wax patriotically lyrical. This Jaguar inspired gasps among both the French and British fans. We followed the race to the sound of “Regardez, leJaguar” and “Ee up, lad, look at t’ Jag.”

Chris Froome and his Team Sky Procycling colleagues ride Buttertubs Pass on Stage 1 of the 2014 Tour De France route, followed by their Jaguar support car. Photograph: Simon Wilkinson/REX

Amusingly for any cycle-racing fan, the interior trim of the car is all carbon fibre, the material of choice for frames and wheels. More broadly, it’s all very James Bond – turn on the ignition and a joystick rises silently out of the vast console while the air vents ease gently open. The electronic boot closure is very slow – almost sinisterly so.

That’s not to say Jaguar has achieved perfection here. There’s a price to pay for the swept-back lines, and it is levied mainly in the headroom. It’s disconcerting to have your eyeline above the top of the windscreen. The split-screen satnav was overcomplex and hard to interpret – not what you want in an item that should give the information you need at a glance.

In terms of cargo space, it doesn’t match some of the larger estates, but makes up for it with a decent amount of backseat room and a rather neat hatch in the middle of the rear bench through which you can poke your skis or, as I did, the handlebars of the bike which came with me on Tour.

Part of the joy of driving the Tour is its variety: many miles on the autoroute, lots of gentle grooving along well-maintained rural roads – how, in a country this large, is there barely a pothole in la France profonde? – and plenty of twists and turns in the mountains.

With the cruise control on, the sheer silence lent autoroute driving an extracorporeal feel, while in the mountains it was far more stimulating. There aren’t many cars as long as this that you can throw about with such gay abandon on the hairpins of the Alps. It may have been down to the self-levelling air suspension or the dynamic stability control, but, whatever it was, it worked. Fortunately we didn’t need to test the Jaguar as intensely as some French colleagues did when they managed to get caught in front of the race leader Vincenzo Nibali on a key Pyrenean descent. This sort of thing is frowned upon, and they were banned from the race.

There was a further test, however. One evening the Tour’s logistics team sent the caravan down a mountain on a steep and rocky road. This wasn’t what the Sportbrake was designed for and we took such care that an impatient colleague suggested on Twitter that we deserved to be lynched for holding up the convoy. And so the Jaguar achieved a first for a Tour press car – a complaint for being driven too carefully.

Red Bull flies over Ascot

The Red Bull Air Race World Championship season is now underway, as the world’s fastest motorsport series returns to the skies after a three-year break. And this weekend the planes will be performing in the skies over Ascot. You’ll have to be quick, though, as the event is this weekend – 17 and 18 August. Sorry not to give you more notice. But you are still in time for a tremendous day. The Red Bull Air Race World Championship features the world’s best race pilots, including Britain’s reigning two-time world champion Paul Bonhomme. Using the fastest, most agile and lightweight racing planes, pilots navigate a low-level aerial track made up of air-filled pylons 80ft high at speeds of up to 230mph. The competition this year is even more intense as all 12 pilots are using a standardised engine and propeller, intensifying the focus on pilot skill and precision flying. Often the course is held over water, but unusually at Ascot it is over the ground. Tickets are now available at redbullairrace.com.